The Days of Our Years
by DocJorgensen
Summary: 'Marriage was sweet compared to dust on his mugs and holes in his socks. This is a new life, with only memories and the regrets that he shoulders with waking. ' An ambiguous look at a certain man who has had everything, and lost it all.


**A/N:** an ambiguous look at a certain man who has had everything, and lost it all.

_She was my North, my South, my East and West,_

_My working week and my Sunday rest,_

_My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;_

_I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong._

_The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;_

_Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;_

_Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,_

_For nothing now can ever come to any good._

_-W. H. Auden, 'Funeral Blues'_

He wakes to a dull morning, and an empty bed. There is no body next to his to warm the sheets, no woman he would regret to leave. There is no breakfast waiting in the kitchen, or cheerful singing in the morning, or the smell of strong, bitter coffee just for him.

The bedsprings creak as he leaves, and he wonders how long it has been since it was a woman's creak, and the shift of the mattress. She has never seen this bed, much less slept in it.

This is a new life, with only memories and the regrets that he shoulders with waking.

Memories, after all, are only warm in his dreams.

He is snappish in the office, and drinks too much coffee to fill that empty space, and wonders how long duty can replace the work of love, and drinks more coffee because the emptiness is growing.

He wears jumpers because she liked them, and wonders if he can still smell her scent, sweet and fragrant. Was this one that she purchased for him? The comfortable fabric soothes him, and sometimes he wears it straight against his skin. It is a pale mockery of something better, but he can't help but imagine he is closer to her this way.

He is so filled with regrets that sometimes he bitterly sits at his kitchen table and turns heavy thoughts over and over in his mind, knowing he can never digest them and they will sit like lead.

It is a paradox of life that he can be so filled with regret and yet ache with emptiness.

But he goes to work, and pays the bills, sits in the pub and drinks beer slowly so as to fill up the empty hours. But the beer only gives him a mild buzz, when he really wants to be so pissed that he can see her again. And she would smile, ever so slightly and beckon with those delicate fingers and he would be forgiven.

Or at least, that it was happens when he dreams of her. Her fingers are gentle and soft, her eyes bright and loving and her mouth demands his kisses. She is everything he wants and more, and he places a hand on hers, and knows that she is his for the taking.

And then he wakes up in a cold bed, and the feeling of stubble scraping wet fabric.

He isn't sure what's worse – the dreaming or the remembering. Because in his dreams he is forgiven, and in his memories – who can say? Marriage was sweet compared to dust on his mugs and holes in his socks.

Gently, his mind tells him. Carefully, cautiously. His life strings are so taut and so thin they could snap effortlessly. And who would remember him, but as a tired, worn-out copper, who gave in when he should have kept on fighting?

Life is bitterly present, so that all memories of her are fading away, and he cannot quite grasp at the sound of her voice in love or how he had answered her.

And to who could he pray, when the fault was all his?

And how can he live, when he lives in death?

For surely, no man could live with such a hole in his chest, and no man could die enough for forgiveness.

But he comes home to an empty house, sterile and cold, and burns his supper. The dregs of morning coffee are thick and bitterly strong, no sugar or cream can disguise that.

And when the clock strikes twelve in the still and cold house, he lays like the dead between slack sheets, praying only to dream.

When he wakes at the second chime of fourth hour, he is silent and rolls over in the empty bed and does not dream.


End file.
